Who do I believe?

I was reading for my argumentative writing class again today, when I noticed something similar that Aristotle mentions in "The Aim of Man." He states, "A man judges and is called a good judge of the things about which he knows. If he has been educated in a particular subject he is a good judge of that subject" (Aristotle pg. 653 from A World of Ideas). The reason this struck my attention was because it was exactly what I wrote about in my blog entry yesterday. People often quote experts on a subject when writing papers on that subject. It provides "extrinsic proof" that allows a writer to better establish their ethos, or character. This is effective because a person who is an "expert" on a subject is thought of to be highly educated on a particular topic and as Aristotle mentions, "a good judge of that subject."

As I was thinking about this, I thought about a particular time in my life that provided me with proof that what many accomplished writers were stating about extrinsic proofs was indeed true. It was not difficult to come up with numerous occasions where this could be applied to my own life, but I will limit this blog entry to one example: I am a part of the swim team for the University of Michigan, and a few weeks ago after one morning practice, we had a team meeting. My coach decided it would be beneficial for all of us to hear about recovery, so she took the liberty of looking up statistics, facts, and information on the internet to share with us and prove to us that we needed to sleep to aid in our recovery process. It was never shared with us where this information was coming from, and knowing the background my coach has as a German major, I was not compelled to accept everything she was teaching us. On the contrary, I am also in a Neurobiology of Sleep class right now where we had a lecture on the restoration and recovery that occurs in sleep. A doctor specializing in sleep came in to present this information, and was indeed given an introduction of his accomplishments and studies, etc. before he began to lecture. Everything he said that day, I believed without questioning.

So now I get to my point; in the same week, I had almost all of the same information given to me about certain processes of sleep, but it was far easier to accept the information that was presented by an expert on the subject. This is just an simple example I came up with of how providing extrinsic proof can help build a better argument.